My ALLi author guest this episode is Cliff Lovette, an Atlanta-based author who came to fiction after a long career as an entertainment lawyer, working with major artists during a pivotal time in the music industry. He held onto a remarkable true story about a Soviet circus stranded in the United States for more than thirty years before turning it into his novel. His journey is one of delay, reinvention, and finally taking the leap into storytelling.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Cliff Lovette
About the Host
Howard Lovy is an author, developmental editor, and writing coach with a long career in journalism and publishing. He works with writers at many stages of their careers, with a focus on helping them develop their ideas and strengthen their work while preserving their unique voices. He lives in Northern Michigan.
About the Guest
Cliff Lovette learned the remarkable true story behind Circus Bim Bom in 1991, when the American road manager of a Soviet circus walked into his Atlanta entertainment law firm. That encounter planted a seed that grew over three decades into his debut novel. A former senior vice president at LaFace Records and a graduate of Tufts University and Emory Law School, Lovette lives in Sandy Springs, Georgia, with his dog, London. Visit https://bimbombookclub.com/ to meet the characters and explore the world behind the story.
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Read the Transcript
Cliff Lovette Hi, my name is Cliff Lovette, here in Atlanta, Georgia. I had a career in the entertainment business — I was an entertainment lawyer — and I raised a family here. And now I call myself an author, because I just released my debut book, Circus Bimbo: A Cold War Adventure.
Howard Lovy: Well, congratulations on becoming an author. You can definitely call yourself that, because that's what you are. And it sounds like you've been a lot of other things in your life too. So let's go back in time a little bit — tell me where you grew up, and were books always a part of your life?
Cliff Lovette: I grew up on Long Island, in Westbury. Books didn't really become a part of my life until I went to high school. I went to a private school — a Quaker school — where they emphasized literature, and I had some really inspirational English teachers, who I dedicate part of the book to. And then I was introduced to theater and performed in quite a few plays.
Then I attended Tufts University, where I continued with some creative writing courses. I majored in philosophy. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I really enjoyed it — I really enjoyed the critical thinking. And I had a year after college where I decided to just hang out, feeling a little lost. And then I applied to law school, was accepted at Emory, and came down to Atlanta.
From Philosophy to Law
Howard Lovy: Let's stop right there. Why did you decide to go into law after studying philosophy for four years?
Cliff Lovette: Well, I think it was the idea of persuasion, rhetoric, and the critical thinking aspect of it. I wasn't sure what type of law I wanted to practice. I came from a family of lawyers, so that was a head start — though most of them weren't practicing law by the time I decided to attend. I just figured that law was a good foundation for whatever it was I was going to do next.
Howard Lovy: So it wasn't necessarily that you wanted to become a lawyer, but you saw it as a springboard into something else.
Cliff Lovette: Exactly.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. Well, I know how family expectations go — I come from a family of doctors, and I'm the black sheep who became a writer. So eventually you found yourself in entertainment law. How did your career head in that direction?
Cliff Lovette: Well, I liked being around creative people, and I fancied myself as being very creative. I took a course at Emory Law School — in fact, I encouraged the school to start a course in entertainment law and helped provide the educational material for it. At that time Atlanta was starting to emerge as a center for film production, and then of course it blossomed as a music industry center. There were a lot of creative people around and almost a creative energy in the air. That attracted me.
And I was fortunate that probably one of the top entertainment law firms in the world was based in Atlanta. They represented a lot of recording artists, record company executives, and record companies. And I was able to get a job as the lawyer grunt at this entertainment law firm.
Entertainment Law — and Some Famous Names
Howard Lovy: That's great. So impress us — name-drop for us. Who did you rub elbows with?
Cliff Lovette: We represented almost all the country music stars at the time — Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, George Strait, also Jimmy Buffett, and a lot of R&B acts. We represented the Jacksons — not Michael Jackson individually, but them as a group.
And then I ended up getting a job as Senior Vice President of a record company called LaFace Records, which at the time was a small record company, but it happened to be one of the most successful small record companies in history. We had Usher, Toni Braxton, TLC, OutKast, Goodie Mob. My bosses were L.A. Reid and Babyface. It was part of the Arista/BMG family.
Howard Lovy: So not just representing random musical artists, but you were part of a period of musical history.
Cliff Lovette: Yeah, I feel that I was. LaFace Records started as a very small joint venture that was given to two enterprising, creative musical geniuses — L.A. and Babyface — at a time when that wasn't the norm. To give producers that kind of creative and financial support was unusual. And so I went along for the ride.
The Story Behind the Book
Howard Lovy: Now, in the meantime, did you always have a secret manuscript in your desk drawer, or did that come later?
Cliff Lovette: Coincidentally enough, when I was working at the law firm, what normally happened was that if a new client came in who wasn't well established, they would send him down the hall to me. And so Bobby Lieberman came into the office and was sent to me. He looked like some young hippie — long hair, road warrior type. He was a road manager who managed Jimmy Buffett's tours and a couple of other well-established artists' tours, making sure they got from place to place and had their hotel rooms and so on.
He sat down and said, ‘I've got a story you will not believe.' And he proceeded to tell me the story of Circus Bimbo. The story I wrote about is based on an actual circus that came to the United States back in 1990. The story he told me was so fantastical I couldn't have dreamed it up myself. And it stuck with me for more than thirty years before I had gained the courage to do anything about it.
Howard Lovy: Tell me a little bit about the story that Lieberman told you.
Cliff Lovette: Well, he had just gotten a divorce. He returned home from a Jimmy Buffett tour to an empty house and a Dear Bobby letter. The next day he was served with divorce papers and was pretty crushed. And then he got a Sony Betamax tape of this Soviet circus that was going to be arriving in America for a twenty-one-month tour. He was asked if he wanted to road-manage it. At the time he was so depressed he didn't really want to do anything — until he popped the cassette into the player and saw all these Soviet performers. So he decided to take the job.
What was unique about it is that they came as a private enterprise. This was the first time that Gorbachev, with his experiment in capitalism, was trying to impress the Bush administration and the West with his intentions of joining the community of peace and democracy.
Howard Lovy: This was 1991 — the height of glasnost, right?
Cliff Lovette: Glasnost actually started in 1985, and the height of it was 1990 — the year before the Soviet Union ended. So this was April of 1990 when the circus came. And the managers of the circus knew nothing about capitalism, so they unwittingly signed a deal with associates of the Vegas mob to help promote them. And the rest is in the book.
Howard Lovy: Wow. You also mentioned in a separate email that there was some participation from the movement for Soviet Jewry.
Cliff Lovette: Yes. Part of what I felt compelled to do was tell the story of the Soviet Jewry movement and the history of Soviet Jews as an oppressed people. I was trying to figure out how to weave that into the story. What I did — and this is based on truth — is that there were a handful of the Soviet performers who were Jewish. Back then they were not allowed to practice their religion. Things were starting to loosen up, but there weren't any functioning temples or synagogues of note, and no one had ever read the Old Testament. Their only identity as Jews was on their domestic passports.
And so they came to Wheeling, West Virginia, where they rehearsed for a couple of weeks, and they saw some Hebrew writing on a butcher shop in the main part of town. They walked in and were greeted by the patriarch of a Jewish family that had owned the butcher shop for about a hundred years, and he invited them to their first Passover. So they attended their first Passover in Wheeling, West Virginia. There's a whole chapter in the book dedicated to that.
And then there's a chapter called Let My People Go, which is really about reconciliation — covering the Exodus and those other themes and rituals and histories of the Jewish experience.
Holding On to the Story for Thirty Years
Howard Lovy: You spent decades collecting research and materials about that circus before you finally began writing. Why did you hold onto it for so many years?
Cliff Lovette: It's a good question. Perhaps because in the back of my mind I knew it was too important a story to just throw away. I mean, I would move from office to office or apartment to home and I would always purge whatever I had — sometimes things were in storage units — but I never threw away the banker's boxes.
Over the years I collected quite a few artifacts and memorabilia. There were still a handful of Soviets who had stayed in Atlanta, including the man who managed the circus, and of course Bobby. So I started interviewing them, and I got a few law student interns to do some heavy-duty research. I compiled a fifty-page dossier — articles, names, everything. I have the original program from the circus. I've got photographs of the circus performers at their first July 4th celebration on a lake here in Atlanta.
I always regaled my friends with the story. I'm a storyteller in my bones, so I knew it — it was always the go-to story that people wanted to hear. And then eventually my best friend, who had been diagnosed with cancer, insisted that I start writing it. And then the pandemic came along and I had nothing else to do. So I had no excuse, and I started writing.
Howard Lovy: So that's a long time to hold onto what could be called an obsession. What was the thing that connected with you most, and connected with the people you told the story to?
Cliff Lovette: Well, these are people who came to a country that was a former enemy since the start of the Cold War in the fifties. Some of them were forward-thinking, others were very loyal communists. And it was an all-star circus — these performers were pulled from seventy different circuses, and most of them hadn't performed together until this tour. So they were experiencing freedom for the first time, and experiencing it in very different ways.
And they were artists, performers. One of the main themes of my book is that storytelling is a means for transformation — in thought and perception. A lot of the great movements, whether civil rights movements or other transformations in civil thinking, occurred through story. And the circus is the embodiment of that. They came over under the banner of goodwill and peace — coming to open up and hold out their hands to Americans. And to me that was fascinating.
Genre and the Book's World
Howard Lovy: Now, is this straight history or is it what you'd call creative nonfiction? How would you describe it?
Cliff Lovette: It's clearly fiction. While I have a lot of information and I wanted to be authentic, the ringmaster — the narrator of the story — has a creed: never let truth ruin a great story. So the message and the story were much more important than trying to be strictly factual. He sort of warns the reader in the first chapter — this is not investigative reporting. He says some people will probably deny they said something, or insist that he fact-check their alibi. But that wasn't the important thing.
I wanted people to get the sense that it was authentic, that it wasn't just a story of pure fantasy. And as a result, I included a lot of real people who were involved in the story — Gorbachev, President Bush and their administrations, Newt Gingrich — and some of the main characters were actual people who were part of the circus.
Howard Lovy: Your book also comes with a very elaborate companion ecosystem. I was looking at your website — that takes a while to delve into. You've got animated character introductions, book clubs, music links embedded. What inspired you to build that kind of reader experience around the novel?
Cliff Lovette: Well, I think of myself as a storyteller first. The literary way of telling a story with words and books is just one way, and I didn't want to limit myself to that. I really wanted to immerse the reader — my audience — with as many senses as I could. So I embedded QR code links to YouTube music and videos in the book itself.
For example, when the circus is entering Hershey Arena, they play the iconic Entrance of the Gladiators. I have a link to that right in the chapter, so the reader can opt to actually listen to that music while they're reading about the circus entering the arena. And in one chapter called Tear Down This Wall, which covers Reagan's iconic speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, I have the full twenty-minute video at the end of the chapter if someone wants to watch it. It shouldn't interfere with their read because it's at the end of the chapter.
In terms of the website, I really wanted to build a community. I was hoping to write the kind of book that people would want to talk to each other about and share their thoughts on. So I built the Bimbo Book Club on a community theme. You're invited in by the ringmaster, who gives you a quick tour, and there's a reader's room where you can have live chats with other readers or visitors, and there are forums. So there's a lot of interactivity in the website.
And the character avatars — what they are, are authentic-looking visual images, heads, that have voices. The performers speak in English with Soviet accents, and I actually created each individual voice. I originally did that because some of my beta readers were commenting that they had a real hard time keeping track of all the Soviet characters and names. I mean, it's about a circus — I probably have about forty-five speaking characters.
Howard Lovy: Wow. Like an old Russian novel, right?
Cliff Lovette: Yes. So first I wrote a glossary to put in the book, but it turned out it was going to be about twenty pages long. So I decided to create these character avatars instead. It's also a means of discovery — you can go to the website and there's a character room, or you can go to my YouTube channel and meet the characters. They don't spoil the story, but they give some background and you get a sense of their personality. Even Gavish, the circus chimpanzee, has an introduction.
Early Days and Marketing
Howard Lovy: How is that going? How long has your book been out?
Cliff Lovette: The book has only been out since the 1st of March. The paperback came out a couple of weeks early because of a quirk with Amazon — they said they don't provide pre-orders of the paperback. But because I had signed up with Ingram Spark, they started buying the books from Ingram Spark and offering them in pre-order. So I decided to release the paperback a little bit early. But it's still very early. I just started running Facebook ads on the seventh, and I just finished a twenty-three-stop Mariana Yards book blog tour. I was really happy — I got eleven reviewers to write eleven five-star reviews, so I was really excited about that.
Howard Lovy: Yeah. Well, what kind of readers would be attracted to this — history buffs?
Cliff Lovette: I think it's going to be a cross section. It will certainly skew older — maybe thirty-five and up, through to people who continue to read in their seventies and eighties. I've had one reader from Sydney, a distant relative who's in his eighties, and he really enjoyed the book. So it's people who are attracted to complex, multilayered, genre-bending stories that provoke conversation and thought, have multiple themes and deep meanings — but that are also very entertaining.
The Indie Route
Howard Lovy: You published independently and are part of the Alliance of Independent Authors. What drew you to the indie route rather than traditional publishing?
Cliff Lovette: My background is in the music business. About twenty years ago, there was a shift in the music industry. Before, there were a few large conglomerates — Sony, BMG, Polygram, Warner Brothers — that really controlled the recording as well as the distribution of records. And then when the internet came along and digital recording came along, it freed up independents to be able to record outside of expensive recording studios and get their music directly to their customers.
That created a major disruption in the music industry. At first the conglomerates fought it very hard, including suing a lot of people and making threats. And they realized — perhaps too late, but they did realize — that the train had left the station and there was nothing they could do about it. They had to change their business model.
From what I've read and seen, it seems like the publishing industry is going through a similar disruption. It may be early in that stage. It's been a while for self-publishers to have the kind of resources they now do to support them — whether it's Draft2Digital, Books By, or a lot of YouTube channels that provide advice. The means of creating a book, selling a book, and getting to your readers has changed.
And I really like the fact that through direct sales I get to send an email thanking my readers, providing them with free goodies, and maintaining a relationship with them. I don't get that with Amazon, or with traditional publishers. Plus, I'm very creative, and I can't imagine a traditional publisher would have allowed me to use that book cover or do some of the creative things I wanted to do.
Howard Lovy: I always thought it was strange that if you're an indie label in the music industry, you're considered really cool. And that hasn't transferred yet to the publishing industry. Maybe we'll get there.
Cliff Lovette: Well, I think once you start to see independent self-published authors achieve similar levels of success over a period of time — and forego the traditional publishing route rather than eventually going traditional — that's when the perception will shift. It's just a matter of time.
Creativity and What's Next
Howard Lovy: Now that you've made the leap from law to fiction, how has this experience changed the way you think about creativity, storytelling, and the second half of your career?
Cliff Lovette: Well, first of all, I realized that even though I've put my metaphorical pen down as an author for the moment, I'm going to have to start revising my second book — which is complete — and I hope to get it out in December. It's a sequel, so the story continues. And now I'm having to be a publisher and learn marketing and promotion.
I decided to take the same approach to marketing that I take to storytelling. I'm a storyteller at heart, so why not tell a story about my story? What I've done is create a lot of videos — of course the character avatars, but also videos of the characters in certain scenes. I belong to about 250 Facebook groups related to writing, publishing, and storytelling, and I've been distributing reels of two of the main characters. And the website itself is a continuation of the story.
Howard Lovy: So you're a webmaster in addition to being an author.
Cliff Lovette: And I'd never done that before.
Howard Lovy: You're the poster person for indie publishing — you're not just thinking about the book, you're thinking about your author brand too. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Cliff Lovette: Well, thank you very much. I enjoyed it.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Cliff. Bye.
Cliff Lovette: Bye.
